During class we discussed The Fall of Icarus by Bruegel who often depicts scenes of moral lessons, this one being the consequence of pride and too much ambition as it goes along with the mythical story of Icarus. During this time period, people started collecting art for the artist’s name rather than just for the subject matter. This was a big change as it shows the transformation of art becoming a business and having economic value rather than just religious value. Pieces were now being made depicting landscapes, a ‘genre pieces’ depicted regular people doing regular things, having little to do with religion at all. This change also shows artist’s newfound individualism and their ability to have artistic freedom and creating their own aesthetics for what they sell. They can target who they want and paint what they want. Mass production and copies of pieces were becoming more common too, adding the economy of art beginning to grow. Massys paints The Money changer and his Wife as a message that with the increasing mercantile society, people should not lose their religious values.
Bruegel also painted proverb pieces like The Blind leading the Blind and Netherlandish Proverbs, which contains 126 proverbs in one work. He also painted peasant life and more silly pieces like Land of Cockaigne, showing a utopia world where you don’t have to work and food is brought to you. We also discussed different death depictions in works that were usually alluded by a scull being either a reflection in a mirror or as a physical being. In Grien’s Three Ages of Women and Death, he paints a woman’s life as seen by three stages, birth, mid life and death.